How to see who is looking at your Profile on LinkedIn

How to see who is looking at your Profile on LinkedIn

On your homepage of LinkedIn, in the small space near the top of screen, you will see your profile photo and then two figures: Who has looked at your profile and how many views your latest update has received.
It is worth checking these figures out. When you see watch your post views you will notice that more people see your profile when you take action. So if you post updates, or blogs, or engage with other people’s posts or groups, then you will become more visible. And since we aren’t on LinkedIn to hide away, that is a good thing.

The next important info is who has been viewing your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn allows you to see the last 5 views on the free version. Should you wish to see all of the views over the last 90 days, then you can upgrade.

I honestly do not believe it is worth paying money for this.

I have around 5,000 connections (no, don’t be impressed) and I can see who has viewed my profile over the last 2 sometimes 3 days, for free. Of course, I might have been more popular and be viewed 10 times a day, and then I may want that information, but for the majority of users, it is sufficient to check this page every second day in order to keep up.

So what do we find?

There are 2 people who are 2 degrees away from me. In other words, they know someone who knows me. Now maybe they are looking for me or maybe they checked me out and realised that they are looking for another person called “Charlotte Kemp” or perhaps another person who is a speaker, or a Toastmaster, or affiliated with GSF or does social media or lives in Cape Town or, any other key word reason that they may have landed on my profile.

I have three options:

Go to my connection requests and see if they have sent me a request, accept it and have a conversation with them.

If they haven’t then I can connect with them myself, and when they accept, if they do, then I can ask them what they are looking for.

I can shrug my shoulders and move on to …

The people who are connected with me.

Again, there are two of them. We have exchanged connection requests already, and very likely exchanged messages as well. That is always important whenever you connect so that you can begin to establish a relationship and not just celebrate an increase in your stats.

So since we are connected, I can just send them a message and be transparent and unpretentious: “Hi, I see you looked at my profile. Did you find what you were looking for? Can I assist you with anything? I hope you are well. Regards,” Great things can happen from this polite exchange.

Then there is the person who is anonymous. His or her profile is in ‘private mode’, a setting which can be turned on in your ‘Privacy and Settings’ part of your profile.
But why would you do that? If we are on LinkedIn to be found and have professional relationships, why would we go around in ninja mode hiding from people. The only reasons I could think of legitimately would be for headhunters and recruiters who don’t want to update existing clients, or people who want to check out their new beau’s ex-partner.

I am not stressed by that person. In fact, in most occasions we discover that someone is ‘stalking’ others on LinkedIn simply because they accidentally changed a setting and not because they intend to have gone under cover.

So your takeaway?

Have a look at this screen every second day at least. If the people are not changing fast enough, then you are not active enough for people to be looking at you.

Accept the connection requests of those who have looked and tried to connect, and then have a conversation with them. It is honestly the best use of LinkedIn.

And respond to your existing connections and have a chat. Image you are both getting a coffee at work and exchanging pleasantries just enough for that person to like and trust you enough to come out with the real reason why they want to talk business with you.